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  • Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan by William A. Marotti, and: From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945 1989 edited by Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya and Fumihiko Sumitomo
  • Mike Mosher
Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan by William A. Marotti. Duke University Press, Durham NC, U.S.A., 2013. 464 pp., illus. Trade, paper. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4965-5; ISBN: 978-0-8223-4980-8.
From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945 1989. edited by Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya and Fumihiko Sumitomo. Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2012; Distributed by Duke University Press. 464pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 978-00823-5368-3.

Money, Trains and Guillotines presents the art activism of Asegawa Genpei in the political context of postwar Japan. This includes the various social forces that reached a public head in the massive rally to protest the Security Treaty with the U.S., held at the Diet (the Japanese parliament) on 15 June 1960, which then diffused. Labor had grown more progressive, factories were being taken over by the workers and citizens were increasingly critical of the security that bound Japan to the nuclear protection of the United States. That barbed criticism was even aimed at the Emperor … until the Communist Party dictated it be re-submitted in respectful, supplicating tones.

Meanwhile, there were artists who proposed to erect a giant glass guillotine in the Imperial Plaza!

Meanwhile, Asegawa Genpei’s prints based on the 1000-yen bill offered a critique of cash economy and of capitalism. What the artist saw in the tradition of a Dada readymade and Pop Art from London and New York, authorities saw as either gizohai, counterfeit, or a mozo, public threat—either an outright forgery or a more nebulous messin’ with the imagery and integrity of money.

That Asegawa collaborated with a group called High Red Center, whose name—actually made up of the first syllable of each of the artists’ names—only added to official suspicion (reds? revolutionaries? Communists?). Collaborator Takamatsu Jiro laid mysterious cords through galleries, or on the street between a museum and a train station, while Nakanishi Natsuyuki moved from abstract paintings and clothespin-filled installations to staged performances (sometimes covered in clothespins) in galleries or on the streets. Other art collectives were called Neo-Dada, Group Zero Dimension, the Time Group, or the League of Criminals.

The annual Yomiuri Anpan, or Yomiuri Indépendant, art exhibition was visited each year by the Japanese emperor and his wife; this gave an official imprimatur to innovation in the visual arts. Its sponsor, the Yomiuri newspaper, was founded by a police roughneck, given money to purchase the paper, who soon realized its influence and prestige could be increased by literary quality, a baseball team (after Babe Ruth’s visit to Japan) and an annual art exhibition. The publisher’s indictment as a war criminal took place at a time of increasing unionization at the newspaper and elsewhere under the benign eyes of the U.S. occupation.

When the artist Asegawa wasn’t showing works in the annual newspapersponsored Yomiuri Anpan, or Yomiuri Indépendant exhibitions that he based on the 1000-yen bill, he exhibited mysteriously wrapped packages, or rubber sheeting installed on the wall in “Vaginal Sheets.” There was official nervousness as the 1964 Olympics approached, and finally the Yomiuri Anpan was cancelled in 1964, out of fear that the artists might somehow embarrass that year’s Olympics in Japan. As a child in the U.S. Midwest, I remember the Life magazine special issue on Japan in 1964, its cover photo a woman in traditional kimono, wooden sandals and rice powder makeup, gleefully rolling a bowling ball at a public bowling alley. There were articles on wayward youth, dancing at dawn in their underwear and sleeping outdoors, and a feature on macho novelist Yukio Mishima.

None of the art interventions documented in Money, Trains, and Guillotines [End Page 301] are fully understandable without the background of the politics of the time, and the author skillfully presents both art and politics, focused and interwoven. Author William Marotti’s 20...

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